What If Social Media Suddenly Disappeared Forever?

Are you a big YouTube fan? If so, you may have experienced the worldwide shutdown of the video hub last night. According to USA Today, if you visited YouTube.com during the shutdown, the homepage only partially loaded and only showed the subscribed channels, not videos. If you attempted to click on any of the channels you would end up seeing a picture of a monkey holding a hammer and the text "500 Internal Server error." with a message reading: "Sorry, something went wrong. A team of highly trained monkeys has been dispatched to deal with this situation. If you see them, send them this information as text (screenshots frighten them)". That message was followed by a long string of code.

YouTube had it fixed within and hour (by 11 p.m.) but didn't reveal how it happened. You can imagine the reactions of YouTube users. A large number of people were commenting on Twitter calling it an apocalypse if you can believe that. Other reactions weren't as dramatic with users wondering what what they were going to do while it was being fixed. It's amazing that now that our culture is so entrenched in the internet and especially social media, people don't know what to do if it's down. Is that you? If all forms of social media suddenly disappeared forever, would it severely disrupt your life or would you feel like a weight had just been lifted?

Personally, if that happened, I wouldn't even bat an eye. As much as I love to connect with people who are not nearby, I come from a generation that grew up with handwritten letters and phones as the only ways to connect and I am just fine with those things.